The World Wide Web is especially suited to conduct worldwide interactivity. It allows people and all types of organizations to come together in communication, commerce, collaboration and a host of other activities that are only limited by imagination. New services on the Internet are cropping up everyday and the number of users is growing exponentially. Hence, it is normal for any Internet user to be subscribed to many online services.
To subscribe to any Internet service, one normally fills in a lengthy online form and chooses a username and password. This brings about a number of problems. The most obvious is the inconvenience caused by the repetitive typing of one's details every time one wants to subscribe to a new service.
The username of choice is most often than not, already assigned to someone else. Hence it is practically impossible to have the same username for all services. Since security procedures are different for different web sites, it is also not always possible to have the same password for all the services. The most common differences are password length and case sensitivity. Some online subscription procedures do not enable you to choose a password but automatically assign you with one. As a result, one ends up with a myriad of usernames and passwords, most of which one usually forgets. When this happens—and this is one of the most common problems at helpdesks—users usually ask the supplier for their password. This is then sent to them via email, a method that is quite insecure. Some do not even bother to ask for their password and simply re-register. This may resolve the user's problem but for the supplier, this means having a huge amount of repeated and usually useless information in his client database. Having a clean, accurate and focused client database is imperative for effective marketing.
The form-filling hurdle invariably hurts online sales. According to a research published by Jupiter Communications in February 1999, twenty-seven percent of consumers abandon their online carts when faced with having to fill in all the necessary payment, shipping, and billing information.
A number of companies and organizations currently provide initiatives to address this problem. Reference is made to three popular ones. The first is “Microsoft Passport” which is one of the focus points in their Windows XP operating system and .NET strategy. Secondly, AOL, CompuServe and Netscape have their own “Screen Name” and “Quick Checkout”. Thirdly, the Liberty Alliance Project is a business alliance formed to deliver and support an identity solution for the Internet that enables single sign-on for consumers as well as business users in an open, federated way.
These technologies serve their purpose well, but cannot make it as a universal Internet identification tool for the following reasons:
The worldwide ID concept should be central, but at the same time cannot be controlled by a single organization, especially if it is a commercial entity. Its power would be so great, that it would be subject to serious concerns about control of the entire Internet. Additionally, a considerable amount of time has to elapse until enough members subscribe. All the above mentioned methods have the same basic weaknesses which are inertia in adoption, inability to interoperate, and the fact that they do not verify true identity. It would take years to wait out all the people in the world to register, and this concept derives its strength from numbers.
If most people in the world had to have one universal identifier, then most online merchants would gladly comply with it. This is because it considerably shortens the road from visiting the web site and pressing the “buy” button for the whole world population and not just for their regular customers. Likewise, every Internet user would love the idea of having whichever site they visit recognizing him or her by using one universal identifier. To make things easier, it would be convenient for this identifier to be submitted through swipe cards, biometrics, and any other practical interface that may be popular at the time.
The fact that there are more than one rival and incompatible systems for online identification, does not bring promise to the realization of this scenario. Every organization does its utmost to outplay the other. Most online merchants would be forced to either choose only one method to comply with and lose out on the other organization's members, or else comply with all systems. The cost and complexity of the latter option would be very discouraging.
Jim Hu and Joe Wilcox describe this situation very well in their Special to ZDNet News dated Dec. 10, 2001. “Although online wallet and authentication software has seen low consumer adoption, it is widely perceived as a competitive choke point of the future, essentially giving the winner a hand in every transaction conducted online”. . . “As a result, the door is still wide open for competing authentication formats, according to analysts “No one wallet product has been accepted by more than 100 merchants . . . and consumers don't want them because they don't deliver convenience,“said James Van Dyke, an analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix. ‘It's a chicken-or-the-egg syndrome.’”